Desalination plants are being planned in a country that gets more than 160 rainy days per year.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/05/03
By: Timothy Ferry, Taiwan Business TOPICS Magazine
花蓮溪 Photo Credit: Shizhao CC BY SA 3.0
The Formosa Plastics Group (FPG) recently won Environmental Impact Assessment approval for a desalination plant to produce fresh water from seawater at its Mailiao industrial complex in Yunlin. The company is reportedly teaming up with Israeli-firm IDE technologies to design the plant, which will reportedly cost NT$5.4 billion (US$184.36 million) and would produce between 20,000 and 105,000 tons of desalinated water daily for industrial purposes.
Environmentalists have criticized FPG for using too much water from Nantou County’s Jiji Dam reservoir, prompting the company to look for alternative water sources, including desalination. Desalination technology is progressing steadily, and is being deployed in several countries in the world, notably Australia, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
These countries are all located in desert regions, though, where water scarcity makes desalination worth the high costs and energy consumption, and their high water prices reflect this situation. [FULL STORY]